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Buddhist howls

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Jay L. Garfield interviewed by Richard Marshall.

Jay L. Garfield is a game-changing philosopher of Buddhism, niftily jive-talking between traditionalwestern and Buddhist traditions because he knows that parochialism is neither chillin’ nor lovin’ but is rooted in colonial and racist attitudes that bring everyone down. He thinks there’s been progress but there’s still a long way to go so we all need to howl and take a stand. All of which makes him a killer cross-cultural king.

Jay L. Garfield: Well, the answer to this is rather roundabout, and reflects more my own indecision and the randomness of life than anything else. And it is a bit embarrassing. When I went to college I knew what I wanted to study, and what career I wanted to pursue. I wanted to study psychology in order to become a clinical psychologist. So, preparing for my first semester at Oberlin, I chose a bunch of psychology classes, but I had to choose one class outside of psychology. Looking through the catalogue, nothing else interested me. I was young and stupid. So, I did what so many other undergraduates do: I closed my eyes, opened the catalogue, and promised myself to take the first class my finger fell on that fit my schedule. It was a philosophy class. I groaned, but I told myself that I could always drop it after a few classes if it was as boring as it promised to be. Of course, it was a superb class, taught by the late Norman Care. And by the time we opened Hume’s Treatise I was hooked. The attack on the self, on a real causal relation, on universals, and the defense of custom as a foundation not only of social organisation but of ontology and meaning stunned me. So, I decided to double major – philosophy and psychology, but promised myself that I would do honors and graduate work in psychology. The time came for choosing an honors thesis.

I was having too much fun in both disciplines, so I decided to write two honors theses, but to go to graduate school in psychology. So I wrote a thesis on the mysticism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, a text I saw as taking Humean insights one step deeper, as well as a thesis in psychology on attention and behaviour modification. And I provided myself an important safety net. I realised that it was hard to get into graduate school in psychology, and so I applied to graduate school in philosophy as a backup. So then, a terrible thing happened. I was accepted both into graduate school in psychology and into graduate school in philosophy. The philosophyletter, however, arrived with an ominous warning from the APA advising any prospective graduate student in philosophy not to attend, as there were no jobs to be had on graduation. That letter decided things for me. After all, if I were to go to graduate school in psychology, I would immediately have a job, and would never study philosophy again; but I were to go to graduate school in philosophy, I would not get a job, and could then do a second PhD in psychology and settle down to a happylife, having studied both of the subjects I loved. So I went to graduate school in philosophy so as not to get a job. But I failed. I did secure a position teachingphilosophy – happily, in a cognitivescience program – have loved every minute of it, and never looked back.

JLG: Self-undermining, maybe, but I don’t think self-defeating. Buddhistepistemologists do argue that rational analysis leads to the conclusion that rational analysis cannot give us infallible access to truth, including that one. That’s not self-defeating, though; it only induces an important kind of epistemichumility and a clearer view of what we do when we reason. We engage in one more fallible humanactivity among many.

JLG: Easy. Suppose that someone argued that the philosophicalcurriculum in their college could not include any texts by women, because there are just so many important books by men, and not enough time to address all of them, let alone to go on to read stuff by women, or that the faculty is not expert in women’s philosophy. He would be howled down not on the grounds that there are indeed not too many books by guys, but that given a history of sexism, it is immoral as well as irrational to ignore the contributions of women in the curriculum. But people get away with saying that their department can’t offer courses that address non-Western philosophy because they are struggling to cover the “core,” that students have so much Western philosophy to learn that they don’t have time to read the non-Western stuff, and that there are no specialists in non-Western philosophy in the department. In the wake of colonialism and in the context of racism, the only legitimate response is to howl them down.

3:AM: It seems your work has been one of trying to avoid distorting Indian and non-Western philosophy whilst at the same time making cross-cultural philosophy possible. Your bookIndian Philosophy in English co-edited with Nalini Bhushan, takes a subtle and nuanced look at this kind of issue, where of course English colonialism and language is the issue. Can you say just what the problems are and how you attempt to overcome them?

JLG: Another hard question. This in part gets into the methodology of translation. When we translate, we always to some extent betray the text we are translating. That is why translation is so hard and thankless. All you can do is to fail in the least egregious way possible. Sometimes the term one is translating from Sanskrit or Tibetan has no term in English that really captures its range of use. It may be best to leave that term untranslated, and to supply a gloss, inviting the reader to think through a new linguistic term. But you can’t do that all the time, or you give up on the task of translating, and require readers to learn new languages if they are to engage with the new literature. More often, you run into terms that demand distinct translations in distinct contexts because of the difference between their semantic range and those of any of the available translation terms.

But when you do that – when you use multiple English terms to translate a single source language term – you obscure relations between points being made in different contexts that appear to be about the same thing in the source language, but seem unrelated in English. Sometimes you run the risk of taking ordinary terms in the source language and translating them into technical philosophical terms in English, or the other way around, distorting the register of the original. In sum, a translator is always balancing a number of desiderata: semantic range; grammatical construction; lexical resonance; sometimes rhyme and metre; technical register; resonance to particular philosophical systems. Getting one right means getting others wrong. So, distortion of some kind enters the moment one translates. And to the extent that the reader forgets that she is reading a translation, and takes the translator’s choices seriously as the terms of the original, things can get worse. So, imagine the same English term being used for very different reasons to translate a Sanskrit term and a Greek term.

For instance, we might translate DHARMA in some contexts as PHENOMENON, and in others as VIRTUE. But it never means what PHAENOMENON or ARETE mean in Greek. The unwary reader might, however, take the Greek source term to translate the Sanskrit source term and be terribly misled. Similarity is not transitive, and translation relations are always similarity relations, multidimensional ones at that. Now, you raise the question of the role of the English language in our Indian Philosophy In English From Renaissance to Independence. That is a very different matter. In that volume, and in the the book we are now writing on philosophy in English in India during the British colonial period we are not concerned with translations, but with philosophy written in English, but in the context both of Western and Indiantraditions. Here the questions are different, and include questions about language and power, and about the relation between Western and Indian philosophy.

JLG: I think that parochialism is built into many kinds of nationalism and educational institutions in which children are brought up to treat their own culture as the unmarked case, and to mark the products of other culture. In the USA, we learn “art history” as Westernart history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy. And that parochialism is matched by similar parochialisms every place else. It is a bad idea. Each of us ends up thinking that we grow up at the Middle Pole, and that while there is diversity in the world, it is all deviations from normal – our way or doing things. The goal of education should be to dismantle the Middle Pole view, not to reinforce it in the name of the need for a grounding in one’s own civilisation.

3:AM: Finally, are there five books you could recommend for the potential Buddhists here at 3:AM (other than your own which we’ll all be reading straight after this) which would help take us further into your philosophicalworld?

JLG: Let me give you three lists – one a list of scholarly work in Buddhist philosophy; one a list of primary sources; and one a list of more popular, accessible texts.